NVMUG eNews 7/16/2005
Last updated 7/18/2005
Macworld Boston and iView
Geof Gonter reported on Macworld Boston 2005, and Warren Walker demonstrated iView, an image cataloging and management program.
1. Macworld Boston
Geof Gonter reported on Macworld in Boston. Geof just got back at 10 p.m. last night. Geof presented an amazing amount of information given the limited time he had to prepare.
Andy Ihnatko was the keynote speaker. Andy presented something he had made at a Vermont Max Expo we had helped sponsor a few years ago. He started his keynote speech at Macworld with that same demo. In his keynote, he also talked about a new chip and how it will alter your Macintosh experience. He was not talking Intel, but about Arkansas, a new CMOS chip.
Then Andy talked about why the switch to Intel will be good for the Mac. He had tested a Sony Bio and was impressed by how much cooler that laptop was on his lap, and by how long the battery lasted using the Sony's Intel chip.
In the afternoon, Chris Breen moderated a quiz, Intel vs Power PC which included six others such as the author Bob Levitus.
Geof spent most of Tuesday on the exhibition hall floor.It was about 1/10 the size of Macworld in San Francisco, but that had its advantages. You could actually walk right up to the people in the booths, except when there were about 25 people in line for David Pogue to sign his new book The Missing Manual, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Edition. Geof bought a copy. Andy Ihnatko also has book on Tiger available through Amazon.com.
Quark had the biggest booth at Macworld.ÊSome of the larger booths included BMWs,Ê JBL, HP, and the Apple Specialists group made up of Apple Specialists like Small Dog. One small booth displayed a program which sends you an e-mail telling you where it is if you do not log in on time.
There were a couple of credit unions, and not much in equipment sales.You could buy batteries, iPod accessories were very big, and there were all kinds of covers and cases.
TGM Digital had a big booth selling a 6.6 meg digital combination still and movie camera that works with iMovie and iPhoto.Ê It was the busiest booth the first day. The person there had a canned speech and could not answer specific questions. He said they were just about gone, only three left, and a little later Geof saw a big pyramid of them.
Visishield was selling an invisible shield for the iPod, Mini, or Shuffle. You could hardly tell it was there, but when he raked keys across the top of the display screen it left no mark.
STM, Standard Technical Merchandise, was selling a special material for cleaning stuff, and new bluetooth mouse.Ê Bluetooth takes a lot of power and can quickly run down the battery on a laptop.
Geof's PowerBook is getting a curve in the top of the lid, He bought some little plastic pegs that you put on where they say to online to make the top level instead of curved and make it is easier on the hinge. They also had hinge repair kits. Geof now opens his PowerBook from the center instead of the sides to put less pressure on the hinge. (Geof said this is more of aÊ problem with larger aluminum PowerBooks and less of a problem on the 12 inch model.) Geof also showed us a tight fitting cover he bought for his PowerBook that was made out of the same material that keyboard covers are made out of.Ê
Geof won a $79 backpack for his PowerBook at the STM booth. It was quite comfortable when he carried 42 pounds of books, accessories and a computer inÊ it. He showed all of the features including the straps that distribute the weight up across the shoulders. They had a lot of well designed stuff. Find out more about them at http://www.stmbags.com
>Geof Gonter's new computer bag.
Geof was impressed by PhoneValet software that turns your Mac into a complete telephone system, It speaks your messages, and will put voice mail in their folders. Check it at http://www.parlient.com
ÊVersion Tracker was selling their Pro-version. One feature which may make it worth the money is that it goes out and finds all the applications you have, and then tells you if there are any updates out there. If you want to, you can do a search to check all immediately. Geof said it worked very well.
The Apple Specialists booth, sponsored by firms like Small Dog) had Mac G5 towers, iMacs and Minis - about 15 in total you could use. There were very few notebooks out, maybe because so many people their own. HP was in beside them.
Harmon Kardon and JBL were there with specials.
Digital Lifestyle Outfitters had a device that you plug into your power outlet to charge your iPod and send a signal to your radio. It does not require having a transmitter on the top of your iPod.
ÊMacKiev, was selling 3-D weather book and atlas software on a lot of G5's with 30 inch displays. With it you could set a map, put pushpins in to show where you had been, plot plane routes with trip mileage, and get a little info countries.
For more information go to:
http://www.mackiev.com/3d_globe.html
Geof distributed information about Cable YoYo, which is a this squarer device around which is wound the extra cable you do not need. It sells for about $5.00. There is also a version that fits the iPod earphone wires.
Geof also had information about Readiris Pro OCR software to convert paper documents and pdf's to editable text. For more information try:Êhttp://www.irislink.com/opt/uk/products/readiris/pc
Geof said there were lots of user conferences. David Pogue did two. Geof had not used Tiger because our schools are not using Tiger, just Panther, but after attending these sessions he is going to install Tiger on his Mac this weekend.
Geof said the macosxhints.com guy was just fantastic. His presentation was the whole thing. For example, did you know that with 10.4 you can put whatever widget you want on top of whatever applications you want. Go to Expose, click on a widget and start dragging it, and go back to Expose.
Geof quoted someone as saying, widgets are great, they use lots of memory, and are even three or four that are useful.
Derrick Story recommended that iPhoto users immediately update to iPhoto 5.03.
Ted Landau and Dan Frakes shared a program with two PowerBooks bouncing back and forth for a very fast hour. Ê Developer Tools, included in Tiger, contains a bunch of stuff. With the plist editor you can increase the Last Used Items to hold up to 100 items, and can exclude things you do not want to include in spotlight searches. Command-F and Spotlight do the same thing in different ways.
Don't ever move your dictionary or your Mac will never find it.
Geof e-mailed me these links to the presenters at the MacWorld user conferences he attended and to their presentations:
The link to his MacWorld presentation was not present when I last visited. But, Dan promises it soon.
http://www.tedlandau.com/expo.shtm
Link includes PDFs used at the presentation he ands Dan Frakes made on Thursday morning.
Link not yet posted
It cost $99 to go to the conferences. Fortunately, there was a food court around the corner because food at theÊ auditorium is very expensive.
In cities, people get rid of white earplugs so people will not steal their iPod.
In one exhibit a guy controlled his whole house from his Mac Mini, even the temperatures in his refrigerator and freezer.O'Reilly had a big presence at the Expo. They have increased their user group discount from 20% to 30%.
Geof said he learned more on the floor at Macworld Boston than in past Expos. He may not go to San Francisco next year because he could not talk to the professionals at San Francisco. If he went to Boston next year he would do some other conferences. He would not go to the hands-on because they go so quick you can't keep up unless you are a touch typist.
Geof was close enough to the exhibitors so that they could read his tag. A ThinkFree Office3 exhibitor saw him and said, you work in schools, I want to talk to you, we got a deal. ThinkFree is Microsoft compatable software for word processing, spreadsheet calculations, and showing presentations. Microsoft admits that PowerPoint presentations get into trouble when you put them on a Server. ThinkFree wants Geof to test their version. They will send him a copy to evaluate. Geof may be able to report to us this fall.
Office ThinkFree is the commercial program (about $50), not the open source version.ÊFor more information go to: http://www.thinkfree.com
Maybe when Geof has evaluated this program, he will give us a presentation.
There were don't take pictures signs at the sessions. Geof saw someone take a picture and a person came up to tell him if he takes another picture he would take the memory card out of his camera. Inside the hall you could take pictures.Ê
Geof recommends that, because Tiger has a lot of things that were not in 10.3, heÊ would get a book like The Missing Manual, Mac OS X 10.4, Tiger Edition. If he had the Panther edition, maybe he would go into something like OS X Hints on the Internet. Some people buy these books and do not use them much, but his tend to get a lot of use.
Geof said, "Would I go again? Yes!"
2. iView"
Warren Walker presented iView.
iView is a cataloging program, mainly for cataloging images. Warren is working with it for Martinsen Images building a catalogue, so he has been experimenting with its features. It is a data management program for photos, sound, and movies.Ê
>
Warren Walker showing iView
With iView you can create a database of information about images with custom fields or categories, keywords, and thumbnail views. Warren uses text files to edit and add to the categories. He is working with over 15 categories and over 1200 images. An image can be in more than one category.
With iView you can make HTML galleries, create a Web site with navigation built in and CDs, make themesÊ and create an XML database for large scale files. XML takes all the information in the database and applies HTML tags to each of those pieces of info. You can add more features to a Web catalog by doing some hand coding. It comes with several editable templates to change the presentations.
The HTML generator to create the Web pages is a black box. Warren does not know what goes on inside it, and says that my be a good thing though he has run into some strange problems with it. Any item in the database can be shown on the Web page by hand editing the template.
ÊWarren displayed a list of items under the menu Show - View Options. The File Name was checked, and it was displayed under the thumbnail picture. The information that is displayed can be changed by checking any other items on the list.
You can print directly from the created CD catalogue. iView gives you a lot of options for printing. You can set headers, footers, margins. You can show EXIF information that comes from the camera including the photo settings and date the picture was taken if the photo is imported directly from the camera into iView.
You drag a folder into iView and it will display.Ê Warren demonstrated by dragging in a font folder with 135 fonts.
ÊiView features HTML Galleries, XML data files, text tables, contact sheets, converting image files, converting sound files, easy handling of movies, labels, data finder as another way of organizing, and control of background colors. It comes with a number of fields and can take up to 16 additional fields which you identify by number. You can display as much or as little of these fields as you want.
ÊiView is used by many professional photographers who need a photo management tool that is stronger and more flexible that iPhoto. iPhoto can hold more than 20,000 images in one large file and can index these images in multiple Albums with keywords. While you can create and use more than one iPhoto catalogue/file, this is not a built in feature that is simple to use.
In iView, each catalogue you create is a different useable library. Catalogues contain thumbnails and the database, but mostly just reference the originals. Working within iView you can move your images into different files and folders, and iView will keep track of where they are. (If you move the files outside of iView, it cannot find the path and you will have to locate them within iView again for iView to find them. But if you tell iView to move it, it will know where it is.) This makes iView a more flexible system giving you more control than you have in iPhoto. iView has more sorting features, and more catalogue and Web site creating features.
ÊThe full professional versionÊ of iView lists for $199. They offer a more limited version for about $50. The professional version comes with a 384 page help manual comes in PDF format. You can download a demo which Warren says takes about half an hour with a dial up connection. The demo puts a big red banner across the image.
ÊA separate catalogue viewer is available for free. You can distribute the viewer on a CD with your images. You can run the viewer off the CD on a Macintosh, but with a PC you have to install the viewer on your PC. A Web page catalogue which can also be included on a CD is universal on any machine.
iView does not make you a more organized person, but does help you find stuff, open it and work with it.Ê
For more information go to http://www.iview-multimedia.com/
More From The Meeting
Midge introduced Diane Rolfe, a new member.
It is too bad that Warren's presentation was not included in the meeting announcement, and Gordon Alexander had to leave before Warren's presentation, because I think he would have enjoyed it.
Question from Midge,"How do you get Pages to single space instead of double space? Answer from Hartley,
Use the Inspector, Text section, and change the Before Paragraph and After Paragraph to zero points.
